WORTH WATCHING

Watch: Matthew Rankin's Light Painting Short 'The Tesla World Light'

"I am the only man on Earth today who can achieve this wonder." Whoa - this is cool. The Tesla World Light is a short film produced by the National Film Board of Canada, which initially premiered at festivals in 2017. It's now available online to watch and it's seriously mesmerizing. Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin and his production designer Dany Boivin built hand-operated rigs to animate this video using light painting, to tell Tesla's story with light itself. "The idea is to tell the story using an abstract visual language." Nikola Tesla was one the premiere inventors of the 19th and 20th centuries. His most grandiose invention was the World System at Wardenclyffe Tower, which was intended to provide free and unlimited power to everyone on the planet. Once his benefactor J.P. Morgan realized there was no profit to be made in Tesla's vision of free energy, however, he pulled his funding. Very sad story. This is a terrific short! Watch it below.

Thanks to Staff Picks. Description from Vimeo: "New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one final appeal to J.P. Morgan, his erstwhile benefactor. Inspired by real events, this electrifying short is a spectacular burst of image and sound that draws as much from the tradition of avant-garde cinema as it does from animated documentary." The Tesla World Light is directed + animated by Quebecois filmmaker Matthew Rankin - visit his official website or Vimeo page for more of his work. The short was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017. The film is made mostly using light painting. "To me, Tesla is to science what the early 20th Century avant-gardists were to art, so I wanted to see if I could infuse the visual tropes of these early cinépoètes with narrative meanings," Rankin explains about his goal with this. For more info, visit Vimeo. For more shorts, click here. Thoughts?